Howl: A Jess Character Study
by faceted-mind
Summary: the madman bum and the angel beat in Time, unknown


Fic: Howl and Other Poems  
Rating: R, (15)  
Disclaimer: I own no classic literature, poetry or prose. Gilmore Girls itself belongs to other people, and the pieces of literature I make reference to belong to the poets and authors named.  
Warnings: The burning of a book, and attempted rape of a minor warnings  
Spoilers: Can't spoiler beyond season 3, because I haven't watched it. So... yeah. You probably know more than I do about anything. I only just know that he writes a book.  
AN: These were all supposed to be drabbles, but I suck at editing (this is all unbetaed also btw) and so they have been left the length they appeared. Hopefully all are comprehensible.  
Continuity point: back at the start of season 2, Luke says Jess' dad left Liz 'about two years ago', but at the end of season 3 it's quite obvious they've never met and he left just after Jess was born. I've taken the first road.  
Second continuity point... How long does Jess spend 17? 'Cause I'm seeing two full years here...

_who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus_

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and the angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death

It all makes sense really. After all, neither or his parents had the first idea what to do with a kid. All the voices he ever listened to were in another room, muffled and indistinct, diner was mostly held in silence, food thrust at him until he took it. During parties, people would glance in and make childish noises at him, but he got over copying those when they didn't get him anything. He didn't start talking until he'd been in school a year, because he just didn't know what it was for. He bet Lorelai had never shut up. Rory had to talk as much as she did to get a word in edgeways, anyway. Sometimes, he even feels a little regret. He could talk that much, if anyone had ever bothered talking to him.

When he'd entered school he'd been a year behind everyone else's literacy skills. But the words on the page - when he started to understand that they meant something - entranced him. These words were so much more trust-worthy than the words people spoke, they meant what they said, and couldn't change while he wasn't looking. He'd worked his way through the school library before he left elementary, and one of his teachers took him over to the public library because Liz claimed she'd never be able to find it, or have the time to take him. He couldn't understand why the teacher seemed angry with her, but had forgotten all about it when he'd seen the library itself. He finally thought he knew what love was.

His father started sharing cigarettes with him when he turned twelve. He was high at the time, and thought he looked like he needed chilling out a little. 'It's all that reading', he'd told him. 'it's not healthy for a boy.' He'd barely said two words to him in all the time he could remember, certainly hadn't ever expressed an opinion about his health. He took the first cigarette to shut him up and regain normality. He realised later that things could have been a lot worse. He could have hooked him the drugs.

The music was something he'd introduced to block out two things while he was reading (eventually he'd give up on reading in his own house and find a bench or hidden corner of the city to read in, but for now it was enough). The two things were his mother shouting at his father, and his mother having sex with his father. The two seemed interlinked somehow, as if the man had to lose a fight before he got sex. The music blocked everything out, became his security blanket. Later, when Liz stopped coming home before 2am, and his father started disappearing for weeks on end, the music was turned on its head. Suddenly it was a filler for the deep intense silence. Silence like that could destroy a person, and reading until the morning came was the only other option. There's only so long you can go without sleep.

He had his first kiss aged thirteen. Christie Becker had spent the whole class pinching him, and if it hadn't been for the book he had in his hands that he was trying not to draw his teacher's attention to, he would have almost certainly punched her there and then. When he had pulled her aside outside the classroom to ask what she wanted she had planted one on him, nearly breaking his nose and scrapping at his lips with rough braces. The book had been _Howl_, the first time he had read it. Somehow he remembered more what he was thinking about the poetry than the kiss, but it was his first kiss none the less.

It was a good time later, after his father had left and when his mother started dating again that he finally found someone worth talking to. Bill turned up with a copy of _Howl_ that was tattered at the edges, which he left on Liz's dresser when they went out together at night, but carried in his back pocket every other moment of the day. He had read it more than once by now, absorbed its every word and found his own copy so that he could write his own thoughts in the margins. He might not have bought it himself, more acquired it as he passed by the stall outside the second-hand bookshop, but it was precious to him.

One of their most intense discussions was the nature of Ginsberg's homosexuality and his relationship with the city in which he grew up. It was the first time he thought he saw Bill with fire in his eyes, inspired by what he was talking about, and somehow talking about the words as they were written down was so much easier than thinking up new things to say. (Bill quotes briefly: 'And the injured losing their injury in innocence.' and smiles more softly this time. It's such a rush to hear the words out loud that Jess feels like his mouth might break from smiling. Bill frowns and reaches out to touch the side of his mouth, and then leans in and kisses him.)

He tells the police, too angry to be easily coherent, but perhaps his sarcasm is too much. Because somehow the petty larceny and ill-timed pranks on his record make him a liar now - and yeah, that makes so much sense - and he gets written up for grievous bodily harm when his mother turns up and tells him that Bill's nose is broken and he's had to have stitches in his chin. Liz calls Luke the next morning, and Jess watches as his copy of _Howl_ burns in the street, the match still in his hand, holding it until it burns too closely to his fingers and he drops it onto the charred book. Stars Hollow is small comfort, but somehow that girl with that book in her room…

At first he thought people would see it on him, like some visible mark. He expected cries of 'homo' from the corners of rooms when he walked in. He picked fights because he needed to feel like a man again, and he talked to Rory because when she talked about books her eyes got that light in them. That same light. He tried not to think about it too hard. There wasn't any one else in the town worth talking to anyway. They were people who based their whole lives around things that weren't written down. Sure they had plans, things they had written down themselves, sometimes. But what did they know about the world outside this crappy town.

_A Moveable Feast_ makes him want to be a writer. He would suggest it to Rory, but she never did like Hemingway. It's been a while since they talked now anyway, and his book is nearly finished. It's full of truths - Hemingway's advice - and he's not sure he wants anyone to read something that's so real. The words they say will twist the words that are written down on paper, make them less trustworthy. And still, he thinks, at least now they're written down they will be still. Hold his emotions in place to that moment, that time. Now it's written, he can move forward. Now it's written there's nothing to hold him back.

end

Hail to Gilmore Girls, because what other TV will bring you to read pieces of classic literature? For reference, quotations from "Howl I" and "Wild Orphan", Allen Ginsberg, _Howl and Other Poems_ (which I had to borrow from the library, can't find a copy anywhere, and am tempted to start searching second hand book shops). Reference made to _A Movable Feast_, Ernest Hemingway.


End file.
